OT: diagnosing with ping (was Re: Dejawin Lost Connection)

[Fairlight]

With neither thought nor caution, Bill Vermillion blurted:
> 
> And prior to that there was a freeware program for Win 3.1 that
> traced routes and gave a graphics diagram with little icons for
> each router along the way.

Heck, they build latency range-graphing traceroutes into games nowadays.
Continuum has one built into it to test routes to the zone servers.

> This was before MS discovered TCP/IP and you had to have Trumpet
> Winsock in order to use networking.  Boy did MS miss the boat on
> TCP/IP at first.

And honestly it possibly held back the big consumer boom until later than
it would have otherwise happened.  Games, for instance, being a large
segment of online activity, used IPX/SPX for a long time--even after Win95
came out, when they slowly started adopting it.  The first one to really
adopt it (from memory) was Quake, actually.

It's not like there wasn't a calling for it.  Kali was an IPX over TCP
tunnelling program for doing LAN gaming over TCP.  I'm registered user 1372
out of a few million.  We used it to make do until TCP was widely enough
adopted natively, even under Win95.  It was actually pretty cool,
considering the modem speeds of the day were never intended to handle LAN
scale traffic, even at 10b2.  But most things weren't too bad because the
CPU speed limitations pretty much throttled what you could do anyway.

I think the ISP boom probably would have happened a few years earlier if
Win 3.1 had possessed a native TCP/IP stack.  Ditto for Mac though--and
they actually came into any decent TCP fairly late as well.  :(

mark->
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